DP3 - released July

Last week we mentioned that the ExpressionEngine 3.0 Developer Preview would be out this summer. It’s summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and we’ve sent out the first release!

This initial Developer Preview release (DP1 or 3.0.0-dp.1) is a huge milestone. We still have a lot of work to do, and this release is not the finished product, not even a beta/functional preview. But it is ready to let some programmers outside of EllisLab start playing with the new architecture.

ExpressionEngine 3.0 will bring tremendous foundational advancements without changing the things you know and love. The upcoming Developer Preview release (v3.0.0-dp.1 a.k.a. “DP1”) will not be feature complete nor will it be ready to run on a production site. It will have progressed to a point where it is safe to begin writing and converting add-ons. This will allow plenty of time to be ready for the public launch.

We’re going to show how you and your clients can save thousands of dollars a year by paying more for hosting. No typo.

While helping our customers, we log in to many sites. Sometimes, the control panel is slow. To see why it’s taking so long, my first stop used to be Extensions. Now it’s a quick trip to whoishostingthis.com.

Normally, the ExpressionEngine control panel is fast. Zippy even. There aren’t many pages in the control panel that should have an execution time of more than a second.

Late last week we released a Developer Preview for ExpressionEngine 2.8.2. Being that it’s a maintenance release, there should not be any changes required to update add-ons for compatibility.

However, since a few add-ons are still catching up to 2.8, we thought it would be best to open up another Developer Preview to provide an additional opportunity for third-party developers to get help from us and to communicate any issues impeding their add-ons from being compatible.

We are constantly looking at how we can improve how we work with third-party developers to enable their add-ons to be ready simultaneous with an ExpressionEngine feature release. We’ve noticed that some developers are having difficulty being ready on time, and we want to ensure that the pathway for them to communicate with our engineers is clear. So we thought we would create a page in our user guide to make it easier for folks to know about the existing Developer Preview Program, enjoy.

ExpressionEngine has always stored cached data on the disk. This is fine for most sites, but for the sites that get heavy traffic, caching to the filesystem can become a bottleneck. The solution is to store cached data in a memory-based cache store for faster retrieval. In ExpressionEngine 2.8, we’ve brought over caching drivers from CodeIgniter, allowing cached data to be stored in the filesystem or in a memory-based store such as Memcached or Redis.

Security is one of our biggest concerns. However, all the security in the world
doesn’t matter if it’s not used correctly. So in ExpressionEngine 2.8 we are
making a few changes to ExpressionEngine’s security features to encourage good
security habits.

We’ve been quiet… which means we’ve been hard at work. Developers in our Preview program just received our latest work for the upcoming release of ExpressionEngine 2.8.0. This is a feature release and we’re stoked.

The purpose of our Developer Preview is to ensure that prevalent commercial add-ons are ready to go on the same day we release. If you’re interested in joining, please email Wes Baker and include a link to your publicly-available commercial add-ons in your request.